This marks the second year the Marginal Syllabus has engaged educators in social reading, collaborative web annotation, and public conversation. Through partnership with the National Writing Project, the 2017-18 open professional learning project explores civic imagination amidst a shifting literacy landscape. As civic engagement changes and evolves, Writing Our Civic Futures invites educators to consider implications for connected learning and teaching. This post also serves as an invitation to interested participants to engage with these texts, make notes using hypothes.is, and respond to other readers. As an open project, the conversations detailed below that began this last school year will continue online anytime educators write in response to these readings.

For more background on the collaboration between the National Writing Project and Marginal Syllabus, read this post on the Educator Innovator network.

Conversation Context: In October we read How Young Activists Deploy Digital Tools for Social Change, a blog post for DMLCentral.net by Henry Jenkins. The post discusses the ways young activists from marginalized communities leverage the web to lead civic action and amplify social movements.

This reading might help educators:

Understand youth media practices that are emerging online.

Access models of youth civic action and media composition.

Hear diverse cultural perspectives about the role of new media in creating change.

Conversation Context: In December we annotated Critical Literacy and Our Students’ Lives, an article excerpted from Voices From the Middle, written by Linda Christensen. The piece tells the story of how Christensen shifted her view of students, from seeing them as “underprivileged,” to seeing their brilliance, a shift that changed her teaching. She describes her responsive planning process for engaging students in critical literacy. Christensen spoke with us about the piece in this Educator Innovator webinar and we were joined by Andrea Zellner and Kevin Hodgson who shared their reading responses.

This reading might help educators:

Envision a planning process that is responsive to diverse communities.

Reframe their view of students from “underprivileged” to a more asset-focused conception.

Conversation Context: In January we read Night Teaching, a chapter excerpted from Danielle Allen’s book, Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Allen recalls her experiences reading the Declaration of Independence with night students at the University of Chicago, and contrasts those working class students’ responses to the text with the responses of her more privileged mainstream undergraduate students. She shares reflections about political equality, freedom, and the power of language.

This reading might help educators:

Consider the lives of readers as centrally important to the reading of a text.

Plan for critical conversations with students about historical primary sources.

Conversation Context: In March we wrote notes in the margins of The Stories They Tell: Mainstream Media, Pedagogies of Healing and Critical Media Literacy, by April Baker-Bell, Raven Jones Stanbrough, and Sakeena Everett, which was published in the January 2017 edition of English Education. The authors identify six patterns of media injustice used to vilify people of color in the wake of racial violence. Social media, they argue, has potential as a tool to support healing, and can transform media narratives that perpetuate racism. All three authors spoke with us in this Educator Innovator webinar.

This reading might help educators:

Read news with students through a critical lens to identify patterns of injustice.

Incorporate new media to understand and produce anti-racist messages.

Plan for instruction iterating on a series of lessons included in the piece.

Conversation Context: In May we read the introduction to the book From Inquiry to Action: Civic Engagement with Project-Based Learning in All Content Areas, by Steven Zemelman. In it, Zemelman provides practice-based examples and strategies to engage students in social action projects with a focus on amplifying student choice, strengthening engagement, and addressing injustices in the community. We were joined for this Educator Innovator webinar by the author, along with Heather Van Benthuysen and Mauricio Pineda, two educators who participated in his action research for the book.